Blaise Pascal (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662), was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defense of the scientific method.
In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines, and after three years of effort and 50 prototypes he invented the mechanical calculator. He built twenty of these machines (called pascal's calculator and later pascaline) in the following ten years. Pascal was an important mathematician, helping create two major new areas of research: he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of sixteen, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Following Galileo and Torricelli, in 1646 he refuted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. Pascal's results caused many disputes before being accepted.
In 1646, he and his sister Jacqueline identified with the religious movement within Catholicism known by its detractors as Jansenism. His father died in 1651. Following a mystical experience in late 1654, he had his "second conversion", abandoned his scientific work, and devoted himself to philosophy and theology. His two most famous works date from this period: the Lettres provinciales and the Pensées, the former set in the conflict between Jansenists and Jesuits. In this year, he also wrote an important treatise on the arithmetical triangle. Between 1658 and 1659 he wrote on the cycloid and its use in calculating the volume of solids.
Pascal had poor health especially after his eighteenth year and his death came just two months after his 39th birthday.
Read more about Blaise Pascal: Early Life and Education, Contributions To Mathematics, Contributions To The Physical Sciences, Adult Life, Religion, Philosophy, and Literature, Legacy, Works
Famous quotes by blaise pascal:
“Curiosity is only vanity. Most frequently we wish to know only to talk. Thus we would not take a sea voyage—if we were never to speak of it—for the sole pleasure of seeing without hope of ever communicating it.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it.... There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“Let us then examine this point, and say, ‘God is, or he is not.’ But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separates us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager?”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“If we dreamed the same thing every night, it would affect us much as the objects we see every day. And if a common workman were sure to dream every night for twelve hours that he was a king, I believe he would be almost as happy as a king who should dream every night for twelve hours on end that he was a common workman.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)